For Old Parts, NASA Boldly Goes . . . on eBay

Published: May 12, 2002

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Troves of old parts that NASA uncovers and buys, officials said, are used not in the shuttles themselves but in flotillas of servicing and support gear. Such equipment is found, and often repaired, at major shuttle contractors around the nation, as well as at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the shuttles blast into orbit.

That old computer in your basement? NASA is not interested. The agency and its contractors want stockpiles of old parts to buy in bulk for repairing old machinery and building inventories of spare parts.

Recently, Mr. Renfroe said, his team swept the Internet to find an obsolete circuit board used in testing the shuttle's master timing unit, which keeps the spaceships' computers in sync. None could be found. A promising lead turned false. Finally, a board was found. It cost $500.

"That's very inexpensive," Mr. Renfroe said. "To hire a design engineer for even one week would cost more than that."

NASA's growing reliance on antiquated parts is in some ways a measure of how far its star has fallen. In the early 1960's, the agency played a leading role in founding the chip industry. Its mass purchase of the world's first integrated circuits set the fledgling business on the road to profitability.

In turn, the expensive chips let NASA achieve feats of miniaturization that put advanced satellites into orbit and men on the moon. Thousands went into the lunar lander, making its guidance computer "smaller, lighter, faster, more power-efficient and more reliable than any other computer in existence," as T. R. Reid wrote in "The Chip" (Simon &#0038; Schuster, 1984).

Today, NASA is increasingly a victim of its own success. Civilian electronic markets now move so fast, and the shuttles are so old, that NASA and its contractors must scramble to find substitutes.

In the past, NASA procurement experts would go through old catalogs and call suppliers to try to find parts. Today, the hunt has become easier with Internet search engines and sites like eBay, which auctions nearly everything.

Mr. Carr of the United Space Alliance said that when the government bought complex systems like jet fighters, the contracts often had provisions that called for routine upgrades and improvements as a way to limit obsolescence. But the shuttles, with a design lifetime of a decade, never had that kind of built-in refurbishment plan.

The winged spaceships are to fly until 2012. But NASA is researching whether their retirement date can be pushed back to 2020.

For parts hunters, it could be a long haul. The shuttles, Mr. Renfroe of the United Space Alliance noted in an awed tone, "could go for 40 or 50 years."